White Knight
by Dani-Ellie03
Summary: Emma only noticed when she heard a soft intake of breath and looked up to see her father frozen in front of her desk, his mouth slightly agape at the sight of his little girl in glasses.


**Title:** White Knight  
 **Summary:** Emma only noticed when she heard a soft intake of breath and looked up to see her father frozen in front of her desk, his mouth slightly agape at the sight of his little girl in glasses.  
 **Spoilers:** Up through 4x11, "Heroes and Villains"  
 **Characters:** Emma Swan and Daddy Charming.  
 **Rating/Warning:** K+. Daddy Charming so fluffy that cotton candy is jealous.  
 **Disclaimer:** _Once Upon a Time_ and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I'm just playing in someone else's sandbox.  
 **Author's Note:** Anonymous prompt on Tumbr: "Can i prompt? Like some small thing (flash/Drabble/one shot u name it) of emma and charming and her having trouble using her glasses and him being all daddy charming?" As we all know, I'm always up for some Daddy Charming, so here we go! Feedback makes my little day! Enjoy.

* * *

Emma Swan let out a frustrated huff as she leaned forward in her chair, squinted at her ancient computer monitor, and trained her gaze on the surveillance tape currently buffering on the screen. No, wait, scratch that. The video actually wasn't so much buffering as it was _attempting_ to buffer.

She was well aware that small towns had very limited budgets with little to no extra funding for updating technological equipment. She was also well aware that Storybrooke was rather backwards in its technology to begin with. But holy _crap_ , what she wouldn't give for a piece of equipment that had been manufactured sometime after the Reagan administration.

Of course, Storybrooke's technology – or lack thereof – was just an easy target. It was not, some little internal voice reminded her, the real source of her aggravation. No, the real source of her aggravation was the fact that she'd ripped her last pair of contacts that morning. She had a fresh box on order but it wasn't set to arrive for another couple of days. So for the past few hours, she'd had to squint at _everything_ in order to see anything at all and her head was finally rebelling. A headache was beginning to brew just behind her right temple and the absolute last thing Emma needed right now was an eye-strain-induced migraine.

"Henry's going to have kids of his own by the time this thing finishes," she grumbled, squinting directly at the little progress meter on the surveillance video. It was hovering at fifty-eight percent, the same fifty-eight percent it had been hovering at for what seemed like the last hour and a half.

Disgruntled and annoyed, Emma pushed her chair away from her desk, stood up, and headed out to the bullpen. She needed a break. Or caffeine. Or both.

David looked up from his paperwork just in time to see his daughter descending on the coffeemaker as if it held her very salvation – because, frankly, it did. "Is everything all right?" he asked, his face dropping into an expression Emma had termed "the concerned dad look."

"Everything would be a hell of a lot better if we had some actual technology in this town," she grumbled while pouring herself a cup of coffee.

She didn't even like coffee, as a rule. She liked the energy boost it gave her, though, and she'd found that putting all kinds of cream and sugar in it made the taste at least somewhat bearable.

David, who'd grown so used to her cream and sugar addiction that he didn't even bat an eye when she tore open a handful of sugar packets, frowned at her, his concern over her mood swimming in his eyes. He seemed to be weighing his words carefully, as if afraid of spooking her. "I'm sure it would but I wasn't asking about work. You're squinting."

Damn it all to hell. "I'm fine," she sighed, taking her coffee back to her office and leaving her father staring after her.

Except that she wasn't fine, not at all. Her brewing headache was now threatening to explode. There was only one thing left to do, which just so happened to be the one thing Emma was trying to avoid. She just didn't want to deal with the questions and the emotion that would come from it but it was swiftly becoming apparent that she had no other choice. She would rather not spend the next however long until her contacts arrived with a blinding migraine.

After a quick – and ridiculously blurry – glance at David proved he'd refocused his attention on his paperwork, she unlocked the cabinet behind her desk, pulled out her bankers box, and dug out her old pair of glasses. The lenses were a good three prescriptions ago but they would be much better than nothing.

Heaving a sigh, she tucked the box back into the cabinet, locked it, and slipped the glasses on. At least she could sorta kinda see now. It was an improvement, at any rate.

The video still hadn't buffered, which didn't really surprise her. It had, however, gotten up to eighty-three percent, which did. Maybe this thing would be done by the time baby Neal started kindergarten after all.

With nothing to do but wait, Emma poked through her own stack of paperwork. Hopefully she would find some form to fill out or report to write that wouldn't bore her to tears.

Find something she did, and she was so lost in it that she hadn't noticed that David had gotten up to deliver his reports to her. She only noticed when she heard a soft intake of breath and looked up to see her father frozen in front of her desk, his mouth slightly agape at the sight of his little girl in glasses.

Which was one of the many reasons she'd been hoping to avoid wearing them, by the way, because now this was going to become a _moment_. And even though Emma was growing more comfortable with the _moments_ , this particular moment was going to touch on her past, which was still kind of an uncomfortable subject.

"Go ahead and say it," she said, chuckling nervously before the silence had a chance to spin out and grow awkward. "I look ridiculous."

"No," David replied softly. From the way his eyes were shining, Emma would bet a million bucks that he was envisioning a younger version of herself wearing those same glasses, the younger version he never knew. "No, you don't. You look beautiful. I knew you wore contacts but I guess I didn't extend that enough to realize you'd have a pair of glasses, too."

"They're old," she shrugged. Really old; she'd gotten them back when she still lived in the group home in Boston. As she got older, her state insurance had allowed her to get contacts but she kept the glasses as a backup. And thank goodness she did because the glasses certainly came in handy when she was on the run. Keeping up her contacts had been far too expensive and too much of a hassle, especially without a permanent address to which to have them delivered.

David let out a soft breath and sat down in one of the chairs across from her desk. Why did Emma all of a sudden get the feeling that she and her dad were about to have an impromptu little getting-to-know-you session?

"If you don't mind me asking," he said tentatively, as if trying to determine whether or not she would be receptive to this line of questioning, "when did you realize you needed glasses?"

Yep, getting-to-know-you session it was. Not so long ago, she would have shied away from the conversation completely but to her surprise, she found she actually wanted to tell him. "To be honest, I was so young that I don't really remember. I was in second grade … or maybe third. I'm pretty sure the school actually figured it out."

"Were you squinting at the board or something?"

She shook her head. "I was kind of a small kid, so I pretty much always had a front row seat. No, the school nurse gave us vision and hearing tests each year and I failed the vision test. What I do remember really vividly, though, is looking at the world through my glasses for the first time."

David smiled at her, an encouraging, fatherly smile that made her comfortable enough to continue. "Everything was so _crisp_ ," she said softly, smiling back at her dad, "like the world suddenly had definition. I remember being shocked that I could actually see each individual leaf when I looked at a tree."

"What did you see before?" David asked.

"A big green blob," she shrugged. "I didn't know any different because a big green blob was what I had always seen. I just thought that was how the world was supposed to look."

This time his smile was equal parts loving and longing. Emma had no doubt in her mind that he would have given anything to have witnessed the wonder on her face the first time she saw the world in HD.

Thankfully, David didn't voice that desire. What he said instead surprised her, though. "My father wore glasses."

Emma had long wondered if there was any history of eyesight issues in her family. Every eye doctor she'd seen had asked her but she'd never known the answer or had any way to find out. "Really?"

He nodded, a little nostalgic smile on his lips. "I was young when he passed away but I do remember that sometimes he'd let me try them on. I remember thinking that it was so odd that a couple pieces of glass that distorted my own vision made his vision perfectly normal."

Emma smiled as well. "It is weird when you think about it. Thank God someone figured it out somewhere along the line, though. I'd rather not have to go through life squinting at everything."

"Definitely," David chuckled. "Is that why you were squinting earlier?"

"Yeah," she said, somewhat sheepishly. Now that she'd had the conversation she'd been trying to avoid, she felt rather silly. "I ripped my last pair of contacts this morning. I was trying to get away with not wearing anything but I guess I didn't do a very good job of it."

"No," he allowed gently. "Why were you trying to hide it?"

Still sheepish, she shrugged. Part of her had been trying to avoid a _moment_ like the one they'd just had. Not even for herself, really, but she knew the subject of her past was a touchy one for her parents. She didn't like bringing up the stuff they'd missed because it inevitably led to hurt and longing on all sides.

Sudden comprehension flooded David's features. "Emma, you can't always be afraid of hurting us with your past. We know we missed a lot. I mean, good gods, I held you for five minutes and when I got you back, you were twenty-eight years old. But each moment we can try to reclaim now, each little tidbit of knowledge of how you grew up … it's all important. We want to know, Emma. We want to know everything we can because we want to know _you_."

Emma nodded, swallowing hard against the emotion that had risen in her throat.

"All right," David said, giving her a gentle smile. "Now that we're clear, let's move on to the next thing. You have a headache, don't you?"

"Splitting, actually," she admitted.

"Thought so," he said as he leaned forward in the chair and dropped two brown pills on her desk.

Advil for her headache. Feeling the need to inject some humor into this conversation, she snatched the pills and said, "If you even tell me to take two of these and call you in the morning ..."

"I would never think of saying something so cliché," he chuckled, winking at her. Emma teasingly rolled her eyes; dads. "I will say, though, that you definitely should take them. I figured a headache went along with your squinting and it's better to catch it now before it explodes."

A touched Emma smiled at her father, her very own knight in shining armor. "Thanks, Dad."

The sparkle in her father's eyes made it clear that his heart was soaring. "You're very welcome, kiddo."


End file.
